When we say transcend during meditation, what does this mean?

Ever wonder how successful meditation is achieved?

To understand TSM, let’s start with a fundamental reality. Not all types of meditation are the same. This procedure of TSM is different from watching your thoughts, focusing on your breathing, concentrating, guided meditation or trying to be "mindful”.

So what is the important difference?

Accessing your deepest inner reserves of energy, creativity and intelligence. TSM enables us to move within effortlessly. That deepest inner reserve is available to everyone. One learns how to move within, to experience the state of pure awareness or restful alertness.

This is very different from techniques that control the mind or concentrate the attention. TSM is different. It allows the mind too effortlessly and spontaneously transcend.

TRANSCENDING is the natural process of diving inward during meditation, beyond thought, beyond all mental activity. The mind and body spontaneously settle inward and as mental activity subsides, wakefulness naturally increases. This is not sleep.

When the mind comes to a state of complete rest during TSM practice, but automatically remains fully awake, this is the experience of transcending and reaching pure awareness. This state is described as a reservoir of unlimited energy, happiness and intelligence at the source of the thinking process — the essential nature of the mind, one's deepest, inner Self. The TSM technique is designed to facilitate this process of transcending.

To transcend means to go beyond all mental activity, all thoughts, sensations and perceptions, to experience this silent state of pure awareness. It's called 'pure' because it's consciousness in its purest, simplest state — just consciousness by itself, aware of itself and nothing else. This transcendental state is also known as the 4th state of consciousness, unlike waking, dreaming or sleep, with its own style of physiological functioning. It is not a trance-like state or form of self-hypnosis, but a settled, peaceful, expanded state of awareness that is completely natural to every human nervous system. Of course, because transcending is a natural, universal process, we’re all hardwired for it.

Why is transcending important?

Those who meditate, they retire from the outside, they take their awareness from the outside and gradually go deep into the thinking process and eventually go beyond the thought. Transcend thought and then the thinking mind, the conscious mind becomes consciousness. When it goes beyond thought then it transcends thought and becomes consciousness. This consciousness is pure consciousness. The nature of this pure consciousness is bliss--the Absolute. This is called Being.

- Meditation Teacher Training, Mallorca, Spain

Students from all walks of life have succeeded in the TSM practice. TSM practice is specifically a process for effortless transcending, distinct from practices that have other purposes or which engage the mind and keep it active or busy in various ways. This state of transcendental consciousness is very different from ordinary relaxation.

The fourth state of consciousness experienced during practice of Transcendental Stress Management is a much deeper state of relaxation than rest gained during other types of meditation practices. TSM practice is not a process that takes a long time to master because it's based on a natural tendency of the nervous system that everyone already possesses: the ability to experience the fourth state of consciousness.

Find out why the process of effortless transcending, sometimes called automatic self-transcendence, produces the widest range of benefits among the variety of meditative practices. Attend the free talk and begin the practice.

A Meditation Student describes the experience of reaching pure consciousness:

I was meditating one late afternoon when I began to settle down much more deeply than usual. As I became more and more still, all thoughts and feelings settled and I was left in a deep quietness. All familiar boundaries that defined where I was and what time it was, and even who I was, began to fade from awareness and dissolve altogether. I was still awake and yet all that remained was my own wakefulness . . . There was nothing else. No trace of thought or memory entered into my awareness; even the sense of my body and its position in space had vanished. It's not that I missed these things. It simply did not enter my awareness to miss them or not to miss them.

For an indefinitely long time I remained in that state of perfectly simple wakefulness. How long I could not have guessed, for there was no measure in my awareness by which to judge the passage of time. Then, slowly, the world began to be reconstituted around me. At first some faint sensation of my body and surroundings returned; then some sense of where I was and what time it was; then some sense of my person, my projects, engagements, relations, and all those forms of awareness that make up the sense of our everyday world. The world returned to me and was organized and constructed into all the layers of awareness that make up our sense of reality. I was left with a sense of refreshment, of having drunk deeply the blissful nectar of a timeless far away realm of Being. At that moment, my whole body and mind experienced a rush of blissful joy and well being.